Development Of An Expert System Shell For Use In Monitoring Of Industrial Plants

In this paper the details of the Intelligent Diagnostic & Decision Support System (IDDSS), a hybrid tool for developing Expert Systems(ES), are presented. While the shell can be used for developing expert systems in any domain features required for expert systems in the area of monitoring have been specially incorporated. The shell is developed using the 4GL of the ACCELL development environment and the knowledgebase is created within the UNIFY database. As the shelI has been developed for monitoring it has facilities for data collection directly from the DDCS. Though the shell is developed under the UNIX operating system it can access and use any DOS software. The discussion is presented in four sections. In section I a brief introduction the kind of problems encountered in industrial pIants is provided. This is followed by the discussion on the development of the shelI in section II. In section III an exampIe from process control problem and some of the features of a rotating machinery fault diagnosis system under development are presented. In section IV which is the concluding section , the limitations of the system and the possibility of extending the scope of IDDSS is discussed.